I don't think these moral claims originated in Hollywood. I think they're pretty typical of people in the American Northeast; people who have a lot of ancestry from the Quaker settlers.
The Star Wars Special Edition films are a very different animal. They predate the woke editing craze by a lot. I think that their primary purpose was as a tech demo, but it's hard to think of any of the major changes that weren't noticeable downgrades. I highly recommend doing everything you can to only watch the despecialized editions of the original trilogy. Fanmade Blu-rays are easy enough to find.
> Consider Hollywood’s reaction to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Right after the war started, celebrities immediately called for a ceasefire. This fits with Hollywood morality. The October 7 attack was then in the past. While it was actually going on, sure, you could shoot back. But after the attack is over, a “good guy” would make peace at the first opportunity and trust the enemy to respect the ceasefire. No matter how many times they have attacked in the past, we can’t assume that they’re going to attack again. Maybe they will convert to being good guys. Maybe they will turn out to be decent people who are just misunderstood. That’s how things work in movies and TV shows, after all.
> I wonder to what extent the American left has exported lessons from TV and movies to the real world, and to what extent people were already going to think like this and Hollywood merely applied common delusions about the real world to fictional worlds.
I'm mostly rather left wing (although not American), including on this issue, and I think this a deeply uncharitable way of characterising the left with regard to the ongoing massacre of civilians in Palestine.
It may not be a straw man- there are some very irrational people in the world, and this may well fairly describe the views of some leftists- but it's certainly a weak man. I and many others have not uncritically imported our morality from Hollywood films, and my reasoning for condemning the actions of Israel is not that it is inherently immoral to retaliate or to preventively strike, but rather a consequentialist calculation that it cannot possibly be morally justified to kill tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians to retaliate for the killing of around one thousand.
No belief about the Israel-Palestine conflict is as irrational as a maximally uncharitable interpretation of opposing views.
I agree that it is not morally justified to kill tens of thousands of civilians in retaliation for the killing of around one thousand of your own civilians. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. If you believe that Israel's current military action is strictly revanchist in nature, imposing collective punishment upon the entire population of Gaza for no reason other than sheer bloody-mindedness, then absolutely the military action is unjustified.
However, if you believe that Israel's goal is the complete destruction of Hamas (an organisation which has made it abundantly clear that they will not rest until every Israeli and/or Jew is exterminated), and Hamas employ various tactics that makes their destruction impossible without significant collateral damage, the invasion of Gaza and all of the attendant collateral damage might well be justifiable.
This situation bears obvious similarities with the Borg example in the article itself. If there is an entity that has the motive and means to destroy you, the opportunity to destroy them presents itself, but you refuse to do so because doing so would result in one good person dying - well, I think "suicidal" is an entirely accurate characterisation of that worldview. Reasonable people might well debate on the acceptable ratio of "people who want to destroy you:good people caught in the crossfire", which is where the concept of "proportionality" in international conflict comes in. Contrary to popular misconception, "proportionality" does not mean "they killed 1,000 of your civilians, so you're only allowed to kill 1,000 and if you kill even one more than that then you're the bad guy". Rather it means the acceptable ratio of enemy combatants to civilian casualties. Looking at the past ~century of military engagements in densely populated urban centres, it's rare to find a conflict in which the ratio of dead civilians to dead combatants was lower than 2:1. The current conflict in Gaza is comfortably within this ratio, which puts paid to the absurd accusations of Israeli "genocide".
None of this is to argue that Israel hasn't been excessive or careless in its approach to Gaza, or that they haven't committed any war crimes during the current conflict (I'd be surprised indeed if they hadn't). But "Israel's sole motivation for invading Gaza was to deliberately murder a huge number of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas doing the same to them" strikes me as a - well, as a "maximally uncharitable interpretation of opposing views".
> However, if you believe that Israel's goal is the complete destruction of Hamas (an organisation which has made it abundantly clear that they will not rest until every Israeli and/or Jew is exterminated), and Hamas employ various tactics that makes their destruction impossible without significant collateral damage, the invasion of Gaza and all of the attendant collateral damage might well be justifiable.
I disagree. I don't think it's at all plausible that it's justifiable to destroy essentially an entire small country to defeat an organisation that has killed 1,000 people in a once-in-decades attack. The idea that Hamas 'will not rest until every Jew is exterminated' is just risible, really, given how few civilians they've killed, ever, relative to the number the Israeli government kills every month.
> This situation bears obvious similarities with the Borg example in the article itself. If there is an entity that has the motive and means to destroy you, the opportunity to destroy them presents itself, but you refuse to do so because doing so would result in one good person [dying, I presume you mean] - well, I think "suicidal" is an entirely accurate characterisation of that worldview.
Sure, which is probably why no-one is advocating that.
> Reasonable people might well debate on the acceptable ratio of "people who want to destroy you:good people caught in the crossfire", which is where the concept of "proportionality" in international conflict comes in.
I think reasonable minds can differ to a point. If someone thinks this is an acceptable ratio, I don't think their mind is all that reasonable.
>Contrary to popular misconception, "proportionality" does not mean "they killed 1,000 of your civilians, so you're only allowed to kill 1,000 and if you kill even one more than that then you're the bad guy". Rather it means the acceptable ratio of enemy combatants to civilian casualties.
This kind of condescending straw man is so typical of Israel apologists (Huemer does very similar above). Why don't you try engaging with your opponents' actual arguments?
By the way, *everyone* knows what proportionality means (except perhaps Israel). It's a very widely understood concept.
I genuinely think a large part of what has caused so many to defend the obviously indefensible on this issue is the opportunity to feel like they're in this superior, more logical minority. It's the same thing that motivates many conspiracy theories, I'm sure. Some people are just naturally contrarian, and relish being able to give it 'those stupid idiots think you can only kill 1,000 civilians because they take their morals from Star Wars, only I have the nuanced understanding that actually it's fine to kill tens of thousands of children because of the little-known concept of proportionality'.
This is kind of an ad hominem and not really relevant to the truth or falsity of your argument, but I can't resist pointing out what a perfect example your comment is of this phenomenon. Not to belabour the point, but I can't believe you thought it might be useful to explain proportionality!
Your opponents are not (all) stupid, Fionn (and Michael, and seemingly all defenders of Israel). They just- sometimes with quite principled, well-reasoned justification- believe that Israel's killing of tens of thousands of civilians as part of their retaliation for an attack that killed one thousand is not morally justifiable. You'll be more persuasive once you realise that we understand just as much as you do about the situation and the relevant philosophical concepts- we just hold very different moral views.
> Looking at the past ~century of military engagements in densely populated urban centres, it's rare to find a conflict in which the ratio of dead civilians to dead combatants was lower than 2:1. The current conflict in Gaza is comfortably within this ratio
Can you support this final claim with any evidence? Because I don't believe this to be true at all. Given that Hamas is estimated to have fewer than 20,000 fighters, even if they had already wiped them out entirely we'd be cutting it close with that ratio at this point.
Regardless, however, you're conflating descriptive facts with normative ones. Hamas frankly just doesn't post that much threat to Israel, so it simply isn't justified to murder a whole population because they're in there somewhere. This is such a blindingly obvious normative fact than in any other context you might use it as an illustrative analogy, to highlight the wrongness of some analogous situation. It simply doesn't matter what happened in the past; much of what happened in the past was wrong.
If you are trying to make the case that Israel is no worse than the British Army, then your invocation of past wars might be compelling. If you're trying to make a claim about what is ethically justifiable, those descriptive facts are not directly relevant.
> But "Israel's sole motivation for invading Gaza was to deliberately murder a huge number of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas doing the same to them" strikes me as a - well, as a "maximally uncharitable interpretation of opposing views".
This would be uncharitable... but google doesn't turn up anything for this sentence. Who are you quoting? Did I say this somewhere?
If so, I disavow it; that clearly wasn't their sole motivation, so I'm not sure why I would have said that. But it would be bordering on self-parody if you were just straightforwardly making up silly quotes...
>I disagree. I don't think it's at all plausible that it's justifiable to destroy essentially an entire small country to defeat an organisation that has killed 1,000 people in a once-in-decades attack.
>The idea that Hamas 'will not rest until every Jew is exterminated' is just risible, really, given how few civilians they've killed, ever, relative to the number the Israeli government kills every month.
A fundamentally flawed comparison, given that a) the restrictive security checkpoints Israel erected in response to numerous terror attacks during the Second Intifada have prevented Hamas from committing as many terror attacks as it would like and b) as a result of being unable to commit terror attacks (suicide bombings etc.) inside Israel itself, Hamas instead fires hundreds of rockets at Israel every year, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel) almost all of which are intercepted by the Iron Dome. It's abundantly obvious that the number of Israeli civilians Hamas would LIKE to kill every year is vastly in excess of the number they have succeeded in killing. Hamas leaders have been abundantly clear and consistent over decades that their ultimate goal is the extermination of Jews from the face of the earth.
>Sure, which is probably why no-one is advocating that.
It seems to me that you are explicitly arguing that Israel ought not to have retaliated for the events of October 7th, with your ludicrous claim that "Hamas frankly just doesn't post that much threat to Israel". Or at least if you think retaliation was justified, you have given no indication what that justified retaliation might have looked like.
>This kind of condescending straw man is so typical of Israel apologists (Huemer does very similar above). Why don't you try engaging with your opponents' actual arguments?
In some cases, those are the arguments my opponents are actually making. Perhaps you're more sophisticated than the modal anti-Zionist, but that doesn't make you typical. There are a lot of historically illiterate supporters of the Palestinian cause out there.
>Hamas frankly just doesn't post that much threat to Israel
Aside from when they wiped out 0.01% of their population in a single day, eighteen months ago. If that doesn't qualify as a legitimate casus belli, I struggle to envision what might. If a foreign army invaded the US and killed 34,000 civilians in one day, good luck persuading anyone that said army doesn't pose much of a threat to the US.
>it simply isn't justified to murder a whole population because they're in there somewhere
To reiterate: Gaza's population has declined by 6% since the start of the war, two-thirds are refugees who fled the region. The suggestion that Israel will kill anything approximating the "whole population" of Gaza in the current conflict is fanciful.
>Can you support this final claim with any evidence?
>Given that Hamas is estimated to have fewer than 20,000 fighters
I notice that you didn't support this claim with any evidence of your own. This source (https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html) estimates that Hamas had somewhere around 25,000 combatants before the beginning of the current war.
>Did I say this somewhere?
Yes: "it cannot possibly be morally justified to kill tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians to retaliate for the killing of around one thousand." I think "Israel's goal in invading Gaza is to kill tens of thousands of civilians as revenge for October 7th" is a perfectly reasonable gloss of that segment, and I don't think it's a remotely accurate characterisation of Israel's motives. But if you disavow it, fair enough.
More than 90% of buildings destroyed or at least damaged. That's destroying the entire country. I didn't say they had killed the entire population (yet). You can't help yourself!
Also, the fact you sarcastically call it "a whopping 6%" would be hilarious if it weren't so sickening. 6% of the entire population killed or displaced, or about 150,000 people, about half of them children! But that's nothing, right, since if Israel didn't do that, Hamas might kill approximately 1% of that number over the *next* several decades, as they have in the past few. As far as I can tell, this is genuinely the argument- and we're the ones who need to be taught about proportionality!
> A fundamentally flawed comparison, given that a) the restrictive security checkpoints Israel erected in response to numerous terror attacks during the Second Intifada have prevented Hamas from committing as many terror attacks as it would like and b) as a result of being unable to commit terror attacks (suicide bombings etc.) inside Israel itself, Hamas instead fires hundreds of rockets at Israel every year, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel) almost all of which are intercepted by the Iron Dome. It's abundantly obvious that the number of Israeli civilians Hamas would LIKE to kill every year is vastly in excess of the number they have succeeded in killing. Hamas leaders have been abundantly clear and consistent over decades that their ultimate goal is the extermination of Jews from the face of the earth.
That used to be their rhetoric- it largely isn't anymore (unlike many high Israeli officials). They released a revised charter almost a decade ago with no mention of that.
But previously (and still occasionally), yes- like every other country in the history of the world, their government often sabre-rattles against hated enemies for political purposes in a way that no serious observer would give any credence to- but of course most Israel apologists aren't really being serious observers, they're just looking for justifications.
But as you've just explained, that isn't a serious threat, because they have absolutely no chance of doing anything like that, and it's highly debatable whether they even really want to, which is why they've killed a comparatively negligible amount of Israel civilians EVER. They either don't truly want to, or they can't. Those are the only two possibilities allowed by the fact they've managed fewer than 2,000 ever. Either way, my "ludicrous claim" is evidently true.
The idea that they pose any serious threat to exterminate all Israelis and/or Jews is laughable, and frankly a stupid thing to even bring up. But of course massacring tens of thousands of children needs alarmist rhetoric to justify it.
So no, it isn't a "fundamentally flawed comparison"- it's quite literally just a fact. An uncomfortable one for your position, for sure, but not one you can get away from.
> It seems to me that you are explicitly arguing that Israel ought not to have retaliated for the events of October 7th
Well then it seems to me you should read better.
> In some cases, those are the arguments my opponents are actually making. Perhaps you're more sophisticated than the modal anti-Zionist, but that doesn't make you typical. There are a lot of historically illiterate supporters of the Palestinian cause out there.
There are stupid people on both sides, obviously. Serious people tend to focus on the stronger arguments of their opponents. What you're doing is this:
> Aside from when they wiped out 0.01% of their population in a single day, eighteen months ago. If that doesn't qualify as a legitimate casus belli, I struggle to envision what might.
So 0.01% is an serious threat to the nation, but 6% is a a small number, to be mockingly trivialised as "a pretty poor job" of destroying a country? Make it make sense, Israel apologists!
> To reiterate: Gaza's population has declined by 6% since the start of the war, two-thirds are refugees who fled the region. The suggestion that Israel will kill anything approximating the "whole population" of Gaza in the current conflict is fanciful.
They killed or displaced about 1 in 15 people who live there in the space of about a year. They're well on the way to murdering the whole population, and have given every indication that they intend to continue. Again, you seem to want to have it both ways, where 1,000 of 10 million people, once in a decades long conflict, is this existential threat that justifies the murder of tens of thousands of children to retaliate for and/or prevent in the future, but 50,000-60,000 and counting and another 100,000 displaced of about 2 million people is "a whopping 6%", no big deal, price of war.
The only way the logic could possibly make sense is if you value Israeli lives vastly higher than Palestinian ones. Which, uncoincidentally, many Israeli apologists I've spoken to explicitly do.
> I notice that you didn't support this claim with any evidence of your own. This source (https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html) estimates that Hamas had somewhere around 25,000 combatants before the beginning of the current war.
I didn't think I had to, because that information is widely available- and indeed, you found one of the sources at the top of the google search. So we agree on that figure. See how that makes it impossible to have achieved a 1:1 ratio even if they had entirely eliminated Hamas? And if it's the lower end number, it would be impossible to have achieved even 2:1, unless they had entirely eliminated Hamas.
> Yes: "it cannot possibly be morally justified to kill tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians to retaliate for the killing of around one thousand."
So no, then? You must see that those are *entirely* different claims.
> I think "Israel's goal in invading Gaza is to kill tens of thousands of civilians as revenge for October 7th" is a perfectly reasonable gloss of that segment
It quite obviously isn't. I literally didn't mention Israel's "goal", or even that they had deliberately killed those people. I'm sorry to be rude, but you're either deliberately misrepresenting my statements or you have made an egregious, inexplicable error in reading comprehension. Except I know it's the former because you literally put your made-up straw man IN QUOTES! I don't think I've ever encountered such dishonesty in an argument.
So no, I don't disavow it, because I never said it. I would hope you'd disavow these dishonest antics- but perhaps it's better we just end the conversation instead. There's not much to be gained in a conversation where one party can't be trusted not to outright lie about what the other has said.
Maybe it's a coincidence, but I've never come across an Israel apologist who didn't do stuff like this. Perhaps it's because this is about the clearest, most black-and-white, glaringly obvious moral question that we ever really encounter in the real world, and to get yourself to the other side of it you simply have to lie and obfuscate and fudge the numbers a bit? Who knows; I can't think of any honest, reasonable argument for massacring tens of thousands of children to eliminate an organisation that has killed perhaps 2,000 Israeli civilians in their entire decades-long history, but perhaps someone out there can. That person clearly isn't you, though, and I think I've heard enough, frankly.
>More than 90% of buildings destroyed or at least damaged.
You commenced the conversation talking about Israel killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, with nary a mention of any destruction of infrastructure. It was perfectly reasonable of me to interpret your comment about "destroying the entire country" in that context. Now that I've pointed the death toll is nowhere near as high as you've implied, you're moving the goalposts.
>Also, the fact you sarcastically call it "a whopping 6%" would be hilarious if it weren't so sickening.
I used the phrase "a whopping 6%" to contrast with your emotionally manipulative doomsaying about "destroying an entire country", which I completely reasonably interpreted as a claim on your part that Israel had (or was in the process) of killing the majority of the Gazan populace.
>They released a revised charter almost a decade ago with no mention of that.
I'd love to see this charter. I must say, I find it very suspicious that you're demanding that I back up my claims with sources while being so lackadaisical about doing so yourself.
>their government often sabre-rattles against hated enemies for political purposes in a way that no serious observer would give any credence to
Launching tens of thousands of rockets at civilian targets over the course of several decades is a pretty nonstandard definition of "sabre-rattling".
>Well then it seems to me you should read better.
What, in your view, would an appropriate military Israeli response to the event of October 7th have looked like?
I don't find it terribly surprising that you misinterpreted the point of that article. The argument is not "weak men are the weakest arguments your opponents make; focus on the strongest arguments instead, as a Serious Person". The argument is "weak men are weak arguments made by members of your opposing faction who are unrepresentative of that faction". For example, the Westboro Baptist Church is not a representative member of the faction "Christianity". Scott has consistently recognised that it's entirely possible for a faction to exist in which bad arguments are routinely made by representative members of that faction, and it doesn't make you any less of a Serious Person to point this out (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/, Ctrl-F "ancient and traditional"). Frankly, based on my (admittedly limited) interactions with Western supporters of the Palestinian cause, I think this description applies pretty well to them. The fact that you seriously expect me to believe that Hamas ISN'T a genocidal antisemetic organisation (while providing zero evidence to that effect), referring to the tens of thousands of rockets Hamas has fired at Israel this century as "sabre-rattling", and claimed that Hamas poses no meaningful threat to Israel while fully cognizant of the fact that this war was started when Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people - well, yeah. This is not the talk of a serious person.
>So 0.01% is an serious threat to the nation, but 6% is a a small number, to be mockingly trivialised as "a pretty poor job" of destroying a country? Make it make sense, Israel apologists!
Of course Israel killing 2% of Gaza's population is a serious threat to the Gazan populace. I never claimed otherwise. It is, however, patently not genocide. To extend my earlier comparison, if a foreign army invaded the United States and killed 7 million Americans, that would of course . The suggestion that it would constitute genocide is preposterous. The suggestion that it would constitute genocide if the only reason this foreign invaded the United States was because the United States had previously invaded their country and killed 0.01% of the population would be even more preposterous. In short: fuck around, find out.
>They killed or displaced about 1 in 15 people who live there in the space of about a year. They're well on the way to murdering the whole population, and have given every indication that they intend to continue.
We both know full well that, ten years from now, the total Palestinian population will be higher than it was 2023. Activists for the Palestinian cause have been crying "genocide" for the better part of a century, and yet the Palestinian population has increased by nearly 600% since 1960 (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/state-of-palestine-population/). If there is ever a year in which the total Palestinian population is lower than it was the year prior, I will concede the point that the accusations of genocide may have had more basis than I gave them credit for - but I am very confident this course of events won't come to pass. Meanwhile, when this ghastly war finally comes to an end
>See how that makes it impossible to have achieved a 1:1 ratio even if they had entirely eliminated Hamas?
Last time I checked, 25,000 x 2 = 50,000, which is less than the 46,000 reported by Reuters. (If you're going to condescendingly lecture me about being supposedly illiterate, I am absolutely going to condescendingly lecture you about being innumerate.)
> Last time I checked, 25,000 x 2 = 50,000, which is less than the 46,000 reported by Reuters. (If you're going to condescendingly lecture me about being supposedly illiterate, I am absolutely going to condescendingly lecture you about being innumerate.)
I said I was done, and I'm going to exert all my willpower to avoid getting dragged back in by all that nonsense above. But I can't help myself here, this is too rich.
Your source says:
> HAMAS probably has fewer than 20,000 fighters. It had between 20,000 and 25,000 fighters before the Israel-HAMAS conflict began in October 2023, which has reduced that number by thousands.
Between 20,000 and 25,000 fighters, and now there are "probably less than 20,000. Almost exactly 50,000 (not 46,000) are reported to be *confirmed* dead by your second source, Reuters:
But >60,000 are "presumed dead" because of the 11,000 missing! Could you whip out the abacus and explain to me how that gives a 1:1 ratio of fighters to civilians? If literally every missing person was alive, somehow, and every single Hamas fighter had been eliminated, and we took the very top end of the estimate of pre-war fighters, and Israel hasn't killed anyone else in the week or so hence, we *might* actually get exactly 1:1. Otherwise your statement is bullshit (as you must know by now, hence taking the very top end of the estimate and not even mentioning the range, which you must know flouts a very well-established norm). The audacity to call me innumerate!
And no, I haven't misinterpreted the weak man article; your again-bizarrely-in-quotes summation (you really need to learn how to use those) is a restatement of the premise, but one of the central points is that ignoring your opponent's strongest arguments to focus on terrible ones made by idiots on their side is irrational and unfair.
It's actually being slightly *generous* to you to accuse you of doing the same thing, because in Scott's example the weak man are correctly identified as being only a subgroup of the opposition; his point is in fact that even that is unfair, because it sort of implicitly associates the whole opposition even when you explicitly say it's only some of them (his initial example is "I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder, when talking to someone who didn't frivolously self-diagnose themself). You were generally closer to a straw man, because you didn't just point out that some pro-Palestinians make the fallacious arguments in question, you clearly suggested I myself was making some of these terrible arguments.
But to the extent that you did qualify your statements, e.g. once when challenged you said:
> In some cases, those are the arguments my opponents are actually making. Perhaps you're more sophisticated than the modal anti-Zionist, but that doesn't make you typical. There are a lot of historically illiterate supporters of the Palestinian cause out there.
That is EXACTLY what Scott is talking about. Obviously it is! You're focusing attention on the worst of my allies, while completely ignoring the reality of what I'm actually arguing. As Scott puts it (in literally the final sentence, in case anyone was confused about the point):
> She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self-diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along.
You're either deliberately pretending not to see that you've done exactly that, and accusing me of misinterpreting the post to deflect, or... well, or the pro-Israel lobby aren't sending their best.
And by the way, uncharitable interpreting every one of my arguments doesn't make it "moving the goalposts" when I clarify.
I wrote way more than I intended to when I started replying; your brand of dishonest, obfuscatory mud-slinging just irritates me, I can't help myself. So frankly I'm not even going to read the next one. You've wasted enough of my time, and any fair-minded reader of this exchange will be under no illusions at this stage. There's nothing more to be gained from this. Enjoy feeling superior to all those emotive idiots who prefer the risk of another 1,000 dying in the coming decades to killing 60,000 preventively now.
It is, in fact, perfectly acceptable to kill tens of thousands of enemy combatants in retaliation for their killing a thousand of your people, or as many more as it takes to get them to surrender should you be capable of such. To not do so is a suicidal morality. War isn't supposed to be sportsmanlike. You just kill the enemy until you win or lose, but do whatever you can to win. We certainly killed a lot more civilians in Germany and Japan than they ever did into the US. Same with just every other war we've ever been in. Most civilian deaths in the Civil War were on the Confederate side, too. That's what you have to do when your enemy is also determined to win. You have to show you want it more.
> in fact, perfectly acceptable to kill tens of thousands of enemy combatants
If your view was at all defensible, you wouldn't need to do this kind of sleight of hand. You know we weren't talking about enemy combatants. I said 'tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians'. You know those children aren't enemy combatants.
You must know this stuff isn't going to persuade anyone. So why are you doing it? Just to be edgy?
> That's what you have to do when your enemy is also determined to win. You have to show you want it more.
Well that answers that.
I'm not sure if you have read the thread, but most of us are trying to have a serious conversation here. If your moral worldview is 'you have to kill thousands of infants to show you want it more', I'm afraid you can't be part of it.
How many millions of innocent Germans died in WW12? How many Japanese? How many German women were raped and murdered by Russian soldiers?
The problem with Israel is that they have taken too much trouble to protect civilians. That is why they never win. They should have fought the way every other country does. Then there would not have been any of the terrorism problems.
It is a safe assumption to assume that everyone criticizing Israel is either anti-Semitic or a Chinese or Russian troll. You clearly fall into that characterization.
Of course, in Hollywood the evil enemy will just slip and fall off the cliff, sparing the hero from having to kill him. Similarly, we should expect the Hamas guys accidentally fall out of their windows, one by one.
None of the celebrity statements in the article you linked to support your claim that Hollywood celebrities called for a ceasefire in Oct and Nov 2023 because they think it's morally impermissible to retaliate against a previous aggressor who is not currently aggressing. All but one of the quotes* allege disproportionate killing and wounding of innocent Palestinians—which presumably refers to Palestinians who were not involved in violent attacks on Israelis. You don't address proportionality in Hollywood morality at all in this post.
Ironically, if we use the Star Wars series as a proxy, Hollywood morality tells us that massive loss of civilian life is fine if it is collateral damage. Here's a discussion about how many civilians the good guys kill in the Star Wars movies, particularly by blowing up the Death Stars:
So, George Lucas was not consistent, and if anything, Star Wars could be used as a justification for killing a huge number of innocent civilians to neutralize a few bad people—the very opposite of what the Hollywood ceasefire advocates were saying.
*The one exception is Kehlani, whose quote in the article implies that Oct. 7 was an act of resistance against occupation and apartheid—but this also has nothing to do with your theorizing about Hollywood morality in this post.
> So, George Lucas was not consistent, and if anything, Star Wars could be used as a justification for killing a huge number of innocent civilians to neutralize a few bad people—the very opposite of what the Hollywood ceasefire advocates were saying.
Good point! Would the author feel it was fair for someone to write a substack post asking, therefore, "to what extent the American right has exported lessons from TV and movies to the real world" and calling his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict "deeply misguided" based on his imaginary embrace of this made-up principle that he didn't remotely espouse? If not, why does he think it's fair to do that to his opponents with regard to the idea that they think retaliation or preventive violence is never permissible?
Thanks for this. A lot of the examples here are clearly strange as you point out, particularly if you assume they’re meant for adult consumption. But the superhero who strangely never kills the super villain might better be explained by market forces surrounding the original audience’s demographic—children—than by the emotional satisfaction of the narrative.
If Super Man crushes Lex Luthor’s skull, while this might be morally justified and benefit humanity, it will hurt Super Man’s marketability to children. Mom won’t buy a comic book for little Jimmy where Jimmy’s idol executes people. And this is in part because little Jimmy can’t easily distinguish between Lex Luthor and the prick kid in gym class who gives him wet-willies. Jimmy might be more inclined to disproportionately respond with excessive violence.
Super villain survival also allows creators to build a serial narrative with familiar characters, and saves time/effort associated with the conceptual development of entirely new villains.
Star Wars is similar. Its enormous success was in part due to its ability to entertain children and adults simultaneously. Notice how Star Wars villains are typically alien, robotic or made to resemble machines (e.g. storm troopers). They’re dehumanized and their deaths are often bloodless and largely implied.
It’s only relatively recently that superhero content started being consumed at scale by adults (up through the 80s and early 90s it was still kid’s stuff). Now that this audience has been tapped, you see more narratives like Deadpool, where murder and execution are very common.
As others have touched on, I think this is as much religious (not just Christian) as it is Hollywood. You act in the 'right' way, and the moral laws of the universe (God) will bail you out.
This seems to be a common lesson of various morality tales and is maybe necessary to spread belief in simple, universal rules that are net positive over having each individual carefully weigh each case before them (with lots of resources expended fact finding and arguing). To properly perform this role, stories need to embody the most extreme examples of deontological absolutism.
I think this probably also explains why there is so much dissonance sometimes with modern 'woke' storytelling (e.g. the villain is excused solely on account of having suffered / victim group membership). The logic of storytelling (at least as fables that instruct in proper values + behaviour) demands examples that are pushed to the extremes. However values have changed, and small changes are made to appear very obvious. In fact you could argue (I probably wouldn't) that recent craziness is overstated, and if we travelled backwards through time people would be shocked by the sudden change to overt 'unwoke' messaging in the early part of the 21st century.
I'd say Wicked counts, but Wicked goes as far as to completely rewrite the history of Oz into something quite different that doesn't make any sense at all. Particularly given the race blind casting of the film adaptation, which totally undermines the concept of persecuting someone for having green skin.
With so many males raised by single mothers and female school teachers, young men are left to what's on screens to learn how to be men. Hollywood is as feminine as home and school. That's why I wrote Ideal Man REVIVING MASCULINITY. Boys need guidance into manhood.
I have seen this so much. Young men end up taking on an imagined tough guy persona that only makes sense in the mind of a child. I think the repeated description of poor minority men as "victims" is especially destructive. No young man wants that description hanging on him. Unsurprisingly many of these young men put on a violent, hyper-masculine act that often ends up forcing them into impossible situations that land them in jail or the morgue. So many of these "activist" types are creating the worst possible environment for these young men. I suspect that they know it, and they do it anyway because its gets their organizations better funding. There is no industry as cut-throat and competitive as the NGO/non-profit sector. They do far more harm than good.
Herman Wouk wrote a blockbuster, The Winds of War, about a naïvely optimistic German Jew who refused to escape the Nazis while he had the chance. I think that part of the mystique of the Second Striker is the action movie/Western hero who brushes off provocation, because he is so strong that he has no need to be afraid; thus extreme tolerance of threats is a sign of courage and strength. Every now and then the scriptwriters like to mix it up a little by letting the hero take a beating. Hubris much?
I think there’s validity in discouraging vigilanteism, ie super hero’s not taking the law into their own hands but allowing for due process but you’re mostly right, Hollywood morality sanitizes way too much, dividing the world into good and bad or, a favourite trope, always giving the bad guy another chance (probably coming from Christianity) whilst forgetting about the victims
Killing someone in self defense isn't vigilantism. It's not like Han went out to hunt Greedo and kill him while his back was turned, which'd at least kinda be morally gray. Greedo was clearly going to kill Han from the beginning, given he greeted him by pointing a gun to his head, and was just toying with him out of sadism. His wickedness saved Han's life.
This falls into the trap of thinking that extreme situations are the way we should construct morality.
In fact, we should construct our moral sense first on the most banal and everyday events.
For example, it is absolutely correct to find out why some has done something to upset you instead of immediately or even pre-emptively strike back. Seeking peace in personal relations makes for a better world for everyone.
The corollary is true as well, you can’t take personal morality and ethics and apply it cataclysmic and existential stories like the ones told by Hollywood. You’re right, it’s silly and doesn’t make sense.
In the end, you can’t really build a worldview on thought experiments, you have to build it by talking to people, learning about different ways of understanding our place here. It’s bad enough that we are all blind monks trying to describe an elephant, when you have monks trying to imagine an elephant without touching it, that’s when things get weird.
I strongly disagree. Thought experiments are so valuable precisely because thinking about everyday situations warps our intuitions. The human brain is not optimised for modelling the situations it encounters accurately; it's optimised for modelling them usefully in a practical sense.
Therefore we must take it out of this mode, and consider examples which test the shape and limits of principles in the abstract.
On one set of the tracks were the old, infirm and immuno-compromised people who were the presumed beneficiaries of lockdowns.
On the other set of the tracks was the remaining population of young and healthy people.
The government was at the switch.
The basic assumption of lockdowns was that, by throwing the switch, you are imposing some amount of distributed suffering on the second track (in the form of unemployment, inflation, social isolation, cancelled cancer screenings, domestic violence etc.) but thereby saving the people on the first track from dying of Covid.
Of course, the longer the pandemic went on, this simple framing grew increasingly dubious. You might throw the switch and it diverts the train onto the other track, but then the train somehow hits both tracks (lockdowns are only estimated to have prevented about 0.2% of Covid deaths) or another train comes down the tracks shortly afterwards (even if Covid didn't get them, the people who were most at risk of dying from Covid would go on to be killed by something else within a year or two of the pandemic's end).
There were many different tracks in the Pandemic and not all of them had people tied to them. Reducing the choice to a binary ignores all the other choices that could have been made. Thinking of the pandemic in these terms reduces everyone to either a friend or an enemy when this is clearly not the case. The true enemy is the person who would make you think this way. A friend will always open up your choices and give you options beyond your experience.
Using high level abstractions to understand the world removes you from the world and separates you from people.
As you can see from this very long Wikipedia page, the ethics of extreme death are highly complex and debated. I hardly see how knowing the trolley problem could have swayed people’s decisions here.
On one hand you could have a group that says ‘kill one save six’ and another group that says ‘kill six instead of one to demonstrate power’.
The experiment was not created to expedite military decision making making, rather is was created to examine “the meta-problem of why different judgements are arrived at in particular instances.”
Remember that you disagreed with the idea that a worldview can’t be properly formed from the extreme, abstracted, scenarios of action adventure movies. Ethics, worldviews, moral centres need to come from a variety of sources, including conversations, books of wisdom, observations of animals, family stories. Sure extreme situations can be a part, I would argue a small part, but if it’s the main part, you end up being able to justify war crimes like Hiroshima and Gaza.
I don't understand your objection. Surely it's clear how our response to the trolley problem could inform a decision with regard to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, given how straightforwardly analogous it is to those situations?
How is it relevant that the ethics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are complicated? Did you interpret me as suggesting that the trolley problem can only inform the solution to simple problems?
I'll bring you back to the original point. My critique is that Hollywood abstractions can't alone make a world view. That people make an error when they think there is a macrocosm in extreme events depicted on screen that can inform the microcosm of their lives.
Much happier to discuss that, but I will try address your questions.
I would say that no, your response to the trolley problem would not inform how you make choices around killing people. The reason why it's not informative is in the problem itself and why the problem is interesting.
You will remember that the original thought experiment was presented to investigate why people might make different choices in similar circumstances. It was presented as two options: in the first scenario your choice was to pull a switch to alter the outcome, the second option was to push a man and kill him to alter the outcome. Most people would do the first thing, but not the second. The outcome of this experiment showed both that people are less likely to do direct murders, but are better with indirect murders and also that small changes in a system can drastically affect the out come if there are humans involved.
As well, you don't have a body in the experiment, you have no idea what particular chemical concoction you would have in your brain at the time. Are you a fight, flight, freeze or fawn responder?
The relevance of the complexity of the problem shows how ineffective applying simplified abstractions to it. We are tactical creatures, and are often surprised by our responses to complex situations. We draw on a huge wealth of knowledge, loyalties, desires when we approach decision making in the real world. Although philosophical exercises might help frame your approach, I guarantee you will be weighing the happiness of your friends and family much higher than a previous response to an abstract question. If the abstract question is a primary consideration, you might have issues that can't be resolved in a comment section.
I didn't suggest that you thought it was the only solution, I suggested that it's consideration would be so low as to be non existent.
Movies are so bad these days. I often recommend films to young men I know. It is odd. I am used to movies always getting better, but that has stopped for American movies. For literature it is even worse. I feel like games and fantasy/sci-fi are the only interesting areas left.
Let me add one more absurdity: Hollywood reinforces a concept of "honor among thieves", or a type of inner-group moral precedence. You see this whenever a villain betrays another villain within his social circle. That guy then becomes The True Villain and the "friends" that he wronged work with the heros to take him down.
It's not that this concept is original to Hollywood; it is genuinely grounded in common moral psychology and in how we do character judgments. Yet it obviously has no justification - murder is murder, regardless of who is murdered. Pushing a sense of forgiveness toward those who are parochially good doesn't really track with actual real-world evils: genocide, for instance, isn't usually the work of a lone psychopath, but rather many otherwise normal folk who have shrunken moral circles.
Not to mention in real life, those who work in criminal organizations betray and kill their comrades all the time, both out of greed and personal safety. People who don't want to do this tend to avoid joining, or staying in, criminal organizations.
Great post.
I don't think these moral claims originated in Hollywood. I think they're pretty typical of people in the American Northeast; people who have a lot of ancestry from the Quaker settlers.
Oohhhhhhh is that where it's from... That kinda makes sense actually.
It’s bizarre how people like this could have conquered all of America and the Indians, whose culture had a much more realistic sense of danger.
They didn't. Puritans and Scots-Irish (neither of whom were pacifist) did the bulk of the conquering.
Interesting! Didn't realize they were editing old scenes like that.
The Star Wars Special Edition films are a very different animal. They predate the woke editing craze by a lot. I think that their primary purpose was as a tech demo, but it's hard to think of any of the major changes that weren't noticeable downgrades. I highly recommend doing everything you can to only watch the despecialized editions of the original trilogy. Fanmade Blu-rays are easy enough to find.
> Consider Hollywood’s reaction to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Right after the war started, celebrities immediately called for a ceasefire. This fits with Hollywood morality. The October 7 attack was then in the past. While it was actually going on, sure, you could shoot back. But after the attack is over, a “good guy” would make peace at the first opportunity and trust the enemy to respect the ceasefire. No matter how many times they have attacked in the past, we can’t assume that they’re going to attack again. Maybe they will convert to being good guys. Maybe they will turn out to be decent people who are just misunderstood. That’s how things work in movies and TV shows, after all.
> I wonder to what extent the American left has exported lessons from TV and movies to the real world, and to what extent people were already going to think like this and Hollywood merely applied common delusions about the real world to fictional worlds.
I'm mostly rather left wing (although not American), including on this issue, and I think this a deeply uncharitable way of characterising the left with regard to the ongoing massacre of civilians in Palestine.
It may not be a straw man- there are some very irrational people in the world, and this may well fairly describe the views of some leftists- but it's certainly a weak man. I and many others have not uncritically imported our morality from Hollywood films, and my reasoning for condemning the actions of Israel is not that it is inherently immoral to retaliate or to preventively strike, but rather a consequentialist calculation that it cannot possibly be morally justified to kill tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians to retaliate for the killing of around one thousand.
No belief about the Israel-Palestine conflict is as irrational as a maximally uncharitable interpretation of opposing views.
I agree that it is not morally justified to kill tens of thousands of civilians in retaliation for the killing of around one thousand of your own civilians. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. If you believe that Israel's current military action is strictly revanchist in nature, imposing collective punishment upon the entire population of Gaza for no reason other than sheer bloody-mindedness, then absolutely the military action is unjustified.
However, if you believe that Israel's goal is the complete destruction of Hamas (an organisation which has made it abundantly clear that they will not rest until every Israeli and/or Jew is exterminated), and Hamas employ various tactics that makes their destruction impossible without significant collateral damage, the invasion of Gaza and all of the attendant collateral damage might well be justifiable.
This situation bears obvious similarities with the Borg example in the article itself. If there is an entity that has the motive and means to destroy you, the opportunity to destroy them presents itself, but you refuse to do so because doing so would result in one good person dying - well, I think "suicidal" is an entirely accurate characterisation of that worldview. Reasonable people might well debate on the acceptable ratio of "people who want to destroy you:good people caught in the crossfire", which is where the concept of "proportionality" in international conflict comes in. Contrary to popular misconception, "proportionality" does not mean "they killed 1,000 of your civilians, so you're only allowed to kill 1,000 and if you kill even one more than that then you're the bad guy". Rather it means the acceptable ratio of enemy combatants to civilian casualties. Looking at the past ~century of military engagements in densely populated urban centres, it's rare to find a conflict in which the ratio of dead civilians to dead combatants was lower than 2:1. The current conflict in Gaza is comfortably within this ratio, which puts paid to the absurd accusations of Israeli "genocide".
None of this is to argue that Israel hasn't been excessive or careless in its approach to Gaza, or that they haven't committed any war crimes during the current conflict (I'd be surprised indeed if they hadn't). But "Israel's sole motivation for invading Gaza was to deliberately murder a huge number of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas doing the same to them" strikes me as a - well, as a "maximally uncharitable interpretation of opposing views".
> However, if you believe that Israel's goal is the complete destruction of Hamas (an organisation which has made it abundantly clear that they will not rest until every Israeli and/or Jew is exterminated), and Hamas employ various tactics that makes their destruction impossible without significant collateral damage, the invasion of Gaza and all of the attendant collateral damage might well be justifiable.
I disagree. I don't think it's at all plausible that it's justifiable to destroy essentially an entire small country to defeat an organisation that has killed 1,000 people in a once-in-decades attack. The idea that Hamas 'will not rest until every Jew is exterminated' is just risible, really, given how few civilians they've killed, ever, relative to the number the Israeli government kills every month.
> This situation bears obvious similarities with the Borg example in the article itself. If there is an entity that has the motive and means to destroy you, the opportunity to destroy them presents itself, but you refuse to do so because doing so would result in one good person [dying, I presume you mean] - well, I think "suicidal" is an entirely accurate characterisation of that worldview.
Sure, which is probably why no-one is advocating that.
> Reasonable people might well debate on the acceptable ratio of "people who want to destroy you:good people caught in the crossfire", which is where the concept of "proportionality" in international conflict comes in.
I think reasonable minds can differ to a point. If someone thinks this is an acceptable ratio, I don't think their mind is all that reasonable.
>Contrary to popular misconception, "proportionality" does not mean "they killed 1,000 of your civilians, so you're only allowed to kill 1,000 and if you kill even one more than that then you're the bad guy". Rather it means the acceptable ratio of enemy combatants to civilian casualties.
This kind of condescending straw man is so typical of Israel apologists (Huemer does very similar above). Why don't you try engaging with your opponents' actual arguments?
By the way, *everyone* knows what proportionality means (except perhaps Israel). It's a very widely understood concept.
I genuinely think a large part of what has caused so many to defend the obviously indefensible on this issue is the opportunity to feel like they're in this superior, more logical minority. It's the same thing that motivates many conspiracy theories, I'm sure. Some people are just naturally contrarian, and relish being able to give it 'those stupid idiots think you can only kill 1,000 civilians because they take their morals from Star Wars, only I have the nuanced understanding that actually it's fine to kill tens of thousands of children because of the little-known concept of proportionality'.
This is kind of an ad hominem and not really relevant to the truth or falsity of your argument, but I can't resist pointing out what a perfect example your comment is of this phenomenon. Not to belabour the point, but I can't believe you thought it might be useful to explain proportionality!
Your opponents are not (all) stupid, Fionn (and Michael, and seemingly all defenders of Israel). They just- sometimes with quite principled, well-reasoned justification- believe that Israel's killing of tens of thousands of civilians as part of their retaliation for an attack that killed one thousand is not morally justifiable. You'll be more persuasive once you realise that we understand just as much as you do about the situation and the relevant philosophical concepts- we just hold very different moral views.
> Looking at the past ~century of military engagements in densely populated urban centres, it's rare to find a conflict in which the ratio of dead civilians to dead combatants was lower than 2:1. The current conflict in Gaza is comfortably within this ratio
Can you support this final claim with any evidence? Because I don't believe this to be true at all. Given that Hamas is estimated to have fewer than 20,000 fighters, even if they had already wiped them out entirely we'd be cutting it close with that ratio at this point.
Regardless, however, you're conflating descriptive facts with normative ones. Hamas frankly just doesn't post that much threat to Israel, so it simply isn't justified to murder a whole population because they're in there somewhere. This is such a blindingly obvious normative fact than in any other context you might use it as an illustrative analogy, to highlight the wrongness of some analogous situation. It simply doesn't matter what happened in the past; much of what happened in the past was wrong.
If you are trying to make the case that Israel is no worse than the British Army, then your invocation of past wars might be compelling. If you're trying to make a claim about what is ethically justifiable, those descriptive facts are not directly relevant.
> But "Israel's sole motivation for invading Gaza was to deliberately murder a huge number of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas doing the same to them" strikes me as a - well, as a "maximally uncharitable interpretation of opposing views".
This would be uncharitable... but google doesn't turn up anything for this sentence. Who are you quoting? Did I say this somewhere?
If so, I disavow it; that clearly wasn't their sole motivation, so I'm not sure why I would have said that. But it would be bordering on self-parody if you were just straightforwardly making up silly quotes...
>I disagree. I don't think it's at all plausible that it's justifiable to destroy essentially an entire small country to defeat an organisation that has killed 1,000 people in a once-in-decades attack.
Gaza's population has decreased by a whopping ~6% since the start of the war (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-population-down-by-6-since-start-war-palestinian-statistics-bureau-2025-01-01/), of which two-thirds fled the region. If Israel are attempting to "destroy an entire small country" they're doing a pretty poor job of it.
>The idea that Hamas 'will not rest until every Jew is exterminated' is just risible, really, given how few civilians they've killed, ever, relative to the number the Israeli government kills every month.
A fundamentally flawed comparison, given that a) the restrictive security checkpoints Israel erected in response to numerous terror attacks during the Second Intifada have prevented Hamas from committing as many terror attacks as it would like and b) as a result of being unable to commit terror attacks (suicide bombings etc.) inside Israel itself, Hamas instead fires hundreds of rockets at Israel every year, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel) almost all of which are intercepted by the Iron Dome. It's abundantly obvious that the number of Israeli civilians Hamas would LIKE to kill every year is vastly in excess of the number they have succeeded in killing. Hamas leaders have been abundantly clear and consistent over decades that their ultimate goal is the extermination of Jews from the face of the earth.
>Sure, which is probably why no-one is advocating that.
It seems to me that you are explicitly arguing that Israel ought not to have retaliated for the events of October 7th, with your ludicrous claim that "Hamas frankly just doesn't post that much threat to Israel". Or at least if you think retaliation was justified, you have given no indication what that justified retaliation might have looked like.
>This kind of condescending straw man is so typical of Israel apologists (Huemer does very similar above). Why don't you try engaging with your opponents' actual arguments?
In some cases, those are the arguments my opponents are actually making. Perhaps you're more sophisticated than the modal anti-Zionist, but that doesn't make you typical. There are a lot of historically illiterate supporters of the Palestinian cause out there.
>Hamas frankly just doesn't post that much threat to Israel
Aside from when they wiped out 0.01% of their population in a single day, eighteen months ago. If that doesn't qualify as a legitimate casus belli, I struggle to envision what might. If a foreign army invaded the US and killed 34,000 civilians in one day, good luck persuading anyone that said army doesn't pose much of a threat to the US.
>it simply isn't justified to murder a whole population because they're in there somewhere
To reiterate: Gaza's population has declined by 6% since the start of the war, two-thirds are refugees who fled the region. The suggestion that Israel will kill anything approximating the "whole population" of Gaza in the current conflict is fanciful.
>Can you support this final claim with any evidence?
In January, Reuters estimated that the ratio of combatant:civilian deaths was about 1:1 (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-01-15/).
>Given that Hamas is estimated to have fewer than 20,000 fighters
I notice that you didn't support this claim with any evidence of your own. This source (https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html) estimates that Hamas had somewhere around 25,000 combatants before the beginning of the current war.
>Did I say this somewhere?
Yes: "it cannot possibly be morally justified to kill tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians to retaliate for the killing of around one thousand." I think "Israel's goal in invading Gaza is to kill tens of thousands of civilians as revenge for October 7th" is a perfectly reasonable gloss of that segment, and I don't think it's a remotely accurate characterisation of Israel's motives. But if you disavow it, fair enough.
> Gaza's population has decreased by a whopping ~6% since the start of the war (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-population-down-by-6-since-start-war-palestinian-statistics-bureau-2025-01-01/), of which two-thirds fled the region. If Israel are attempting to "destroy an entire small country" they're doing a pretty poor job of it.
They're doing an excellent job of it since the strip is almost entirely destroyed:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20415675
More than 90% of buildings destroyed or at least damaged. That's destroying the entire country. I didn't say they had killed the entire population (yet). You can't help yourself!
Also, the fact you sarcastically call it "a whopping 6%" would be hilarious if it weren't so sickening. 6% of the entire population killed or displaced, or about 150,000 people, about half of them children! But that's nothing, right, since if Israel didn't do that, Hamas might kill approximately 1% of that number over the *next* several decades, as they have in the past few. As far as I can tell, this is genuinely the argument- and we're the ones who need to be taught about proportionality!
> A fundamentally flawed comparison, given that a) the restrictive security checkpoints Israel erected in response to numerous terror attacks during the Second Intifada have prevented Hamas from committing as many terror attacks as it would like and b) as a result of being unable to commit terror attacks (suicide bombings etc.) inside Israel itself, Hamas instead fires hundreds of rockets at Israel every year, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel) almost all of which are intercepted by the Iron Dome. It's abundantly obvious that the number of Israeli civilians Hamas would LIKE to kill every year is vastly in excess of the number they have succeeded in killing. Hamas leaders have been abundantly clear and consistent over decades that their ultimate goal is the extermination of Jews from the face of the earth.
That used to be their rhetoric- it largely isn't anymore (unlike many high Israeli officials). They released a revised charter almost a decade ago with no mention of that.
But previously (and still occasionally), yes- like every other country in the history of the world, their government often sabre-rattles against hated enemies for political purposes in a way that no serious observer would give any credence to- but of course most Israel apologists aren't really being serious observers, they're just looking for justifications.
But as you've just explained, that isn't a serious threat, because they have absolutely no chance of doing anything like that, and it's highly debatable whether they even really want to, which is why they've killed a comparatively negligible amount of Israel civilians EVER. They either don't truly want to, or they can't. Those are the only two possibilities allowed by the fact they've managed fewer than 2,000 ever. Either way, my "ludicrous claim" is evidently true.
The idea that they pose any serious threat to exterminate all Israelis and/or Jews is laughable, and frankly a stupid thing to even bring up. But of course massacring tens of thousands of children needs alarmist rhetoric to justify it.
So no, it isn't a "fundamentally flawed comparison"- it's quite literally just a fact. An uncomfortable one for your position, for sure, but not one you can get away from.
> It seems to me that you are explicitly arguing that Israel ought not to have retaliated for the events of October 7th
Well then it seems to me you should read better.
> In some cases, those are the arguments my opponents are actually making. Perhaps you're more sophisticated than the modal anti-Zionist, but that doesn't make you typical. There are a lot of historically illiterate supporters of the Palestinian cause out there.
There are stupid people on both sides, obviously. Serious people tend to focus on the stronger arguments of their opponents. What you're doing is this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
> Aside from when they wiped out 0.01% of their population in a single day, eighteen months ago. If that doesn't qualify as a legitimate casus belli, I struggle to envision what might.
So 0.01% is an serious threat to the nation, but 6% is a a small number, to be mockingly trivialised as "a pretty poor job" of destroying a country? Make it make sense, Israel apologists!
> To reiterate: Gaza's population has declined by 6% since the start of the war, two-thirds are refugees who fled the region. The suggestion that Israel will kill anything approximating the "whole population" of Gaza in the current conflict is fanciful.
They killed or displaced about 1 in 15 people who live there in the space of about a year. They're well on the way to murdering the whole population, and have given every indication that they intend to continue. Again, you seem to want to have it both ways, where 1,000 of 10 million people, once in a decades long conflict, is this existential threat that justifies the murder of tens of thousands of children to retaliate for and/or prevent in the future, but 50,000-60,000 and counting and another 100,000 displaced of about 2 million people is "a whopping 6%", no big deal, price of war.
The only way the logic could possibly make sense is if you value Israeli lives vastly higher than Palestinian ones. Which, uncoincidentally, many Israeli apologists I've spoken to explicitly do.
> In January, Reuters estimated that the ratio of combatant:civilian deaths was about 1:1 (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-01-15/).
> I notice that you didn't support this claim with any evidence of your own. This source (https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html) estimates that Hamas had somewhere around 25,000 combatants before the beginning of the current war.
I didn't think I had to, because that information is widely available- and indeed, you found one of the sources at the top of the google search. So we agree on that figure. See how that makes it impossible to have achieved a 1:1 ratio even if they had entirely eliminated Hamas? And if it's the lower end number, it would be impossible to have achieved even 2:1, unless they had entirely eliminated Hamas.
> Yes: "it cannot possibly be morally justified to kill tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians to retaliate for the killing of around one thousand."
So no, then? You must see that those are *entirely* different claims.
> I think "Israel's goal in invading Gaza is to kill tens of thousands of civilians as revenge for October 7th" is a perfectly reasonable gloss of that segment
It quite obviously isn't. I literally didn't mention Israel's "goal", or even that they had deliberately killed those people. I'm sorry to be rude, but you're either deliberately misrepresenting my statements or you have made an egregious, inexplicable error in reading comprehension. Except I know it's the former because you literally put your made-up straw man IN QUOTES! I don't think I've ever encountered such dishonesty in an argument.
So no, I don't disavow it, because I never said it. I would hope you'd disavow these dishonest antics- but perhaps it's better we just end the conversation instead. There's not much to be gained in a conversation where one party can't be trusted not to outright lie about what the other has said.
Maybe it's a coincidence, but I've never come across an Israel apologist who didn't do stuff like this. Perhaps it's because this is about the clearest, most black-and-white, glaringly obvious moral question that we ever really encounter in the real world, and to get yourself to the other side of it you simply have to lie and obfuscate and fudge the numbers a bit? Who knows; I can't think of any honest, reasonable argument for massacring tens of thousands of children to eliminate an organisation that has killed perhaps 2,000 Israeli civilians in their entire decades-long history, but perhaps someone out there can. That person clearly isn't you, though, and I think I've heard enough, frankly.
>They're doing an excellent job of it since the strip is almost entirely destroyed:
>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20415675
>More than 90% of buildings destroyed or at least damaged.
You commenced the conversation talking about Israel killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, with nary a mention of any destruction of infrastructure. It was perfectly reasonable of me to interpret your comment about "destroying the entire country" in that context. Now that I've pointed the death toll is nowhere near as high as you've implied, you're moving the goalposts.
>Also, the fact you sarcastically call it "a whopping 6%" would be hilarious if it weren't so sickening.
I used the phrase "a whopping 6%" to contrast with your emotionally manipulative doomsaying about "destroying an entire country", which I completely reasonably interpreted as a claim on your part that Israel had (or was in the process) of killing the majority of the Gazan populace.
>They released a revised charter almost a decade ago with no mention of that.
I'd love to see this charter. I must say, I find it very suspicious that you're demanding that I back up my claims with sources while being so lackadaisical about doing so yourself.
>their government often sabre-rattles against hated enemies for political purposes in a way that no serious observer would give any credence to
Launching tens of thousands of rockets at civilian targets over the course of several decades is a pretty nonstandard definition of "sabre-rattling".
>Well then it seems to me you should read better.
What, in your view, would an appropriate military Israeli response to the event of October 7th have looked like?
>Serious people tend to focus on the stronger arguments of their opponents. What you're doing is this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
I don't find it terribly surprising that you misinterpreted the point of that article. The argument is not "weak men are the weakest arguments your opponents make; focus on the strongest arguments instead, as a Serious Person". The argument is "weak men are weak arguments made by members of your opposing faction who are unrepresentative of that faction". For example, the Westboro Baptist Church is not a representative member of the faction "Christianity". Scott has consistently recognised that it's entirely possible for a faction to exist in which bad arguments are routinely made by representative members of that faction, and it doesn't make you any less of a Serious Person to point this out (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/, Ctrl-F "ancient and traditional"). Frankly, based on my (admittedly limited) interactions with Western supporters of the Palestinian cause, I think this description applies pretty well to them. The fact that you seriously expect me to believe that Hamas ISN'T a genocidal antisemetic organisation (while providing zero evidence to that effect), referring to the tens of thousands of rockets Hamas has fired at Israel this century as "sabre-rattling", and claimed that Hamas poses no meaningful threat to Israel while fully cognizant of the fact that this war was started when Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people - well, yeah. This is not the talk of a serious person.
>So 0.01% is an serious threat to the nation, but 6% is a a small number, to be mockingly trivialised as "a pretty poor job" of destroying a country? Make it make sense, Israel apologists!
Of course Israel killing 2% of Gaza's population is a serious threat to the Gazan populace. I never claimed otherwise. It is, however, patently not genocide. To extend my earlier comparison, if a foreign army invaded the United States and killed 7 million Americans, that would of course . The suggestion that it would constitute genocide is preposterous. The suggestion that it would constitute genocide if the only reason this foreign invaded the United States was because the United States had previously invaded their country and killed 0.01% of the population would be even more preposterous. In short: fuck around, find out.
>They killed or displaced about 1 in 15 people who live there in the space of about a year. They're well on the way to murdering the whole population, and have given every indication that they intend to continue.
We both know full well that, ten years from now, the total Palestinian population will be higher than it was 2023. Activists for the Palestinian cause have been crying "genocide" for the better part of a century, and yet the Palestinian population has increased by nearly 600% since 1960 (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/state-of-palestine-population/). If there is ever a year in which the total Palestinian population is lower than it was the year prior, I will concede the point that the accusations of genocide may have had more basis than I gave them credit for - but I am very confident this course of events won't come to pass. Meanwhile, when this ghastly war finally comes to an end
>See how that makes it impossible to have achieved a 1:1 ratio even if they had entirely eliminated Hamas?
Last time I checked, 25,000 x 2 = 50,000, which is less than the 46,000 reported by Reuters. (If you're going to condescendingly lecture me about being supposedly illiterate, I am absolutely going to condescendingly lecture you about being innumerate.)
> Last time I checked, 25,000 x 2 = 50,000, which is less than the 46,000 reported by Reuters. (If you're going to condescendingly lecture me about being supposedly illiterate, I am absolutely going to condescendingly lecture you about being innumerate.)
I said I was done, and I'm going to exert all my willpower to avoid getting dragged back in by all that nonsense above. But I can't help myself here, this is too rich.
Your source says:
> HAMAS probably has fewer than 20,000 fighters. It had between 20,000 and 25,000 fighters before the Israel-HAMAS conflict began in October 2023, which has reduced that number by thousands.
Between 20,000 and 25,000 fighters, and now there are "probably less than 20,000. Almost exactly 50,000 (not 46,000) are reported to be *confirmed* dead by your second source, Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/FATALITIES/byvrxlqeqve/
But >60,000 are "presumed dead" because of the 11,000 missing! Could you whip out the abacus and explain to me how that gives a 1:1 ratio of fighters to civilians? If literally every missing person was alive, somehow, and every single Hamas fighter had been eliminated, and we took the very top end of the estimate of pre-war fighters, and Israel hasn't killed anyone else in the week or so hence, we *might* actually get exactly 1:1. Otherwise your statement is bullshit (as you must know by now, hence taking the very top end of the estimate and not even mentioning the range, which you must know flouts a very well-established norm). The audacity to call me innumerate!
And no, I haven't misinterpreted the weak man article; your again-bizarrely-in-quotes summation (you really need to learn how to use those) is a restatement of the premise, but one of the central points is that ignoring your opponent's strongest arguments to focus on terrible ones made by idiots on their side is irrational and unfair.
It's actually being slightly *generous* to you to accuse you of doing the same thing, because in Scott's example the weak man are correctly identified as being only a subgroup of the opposition; his point is in fact that even that is unfair, because it sort of implicitly associates the whole opposition even when you explicitly say it's only some of them (his initial example is "I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder, when talking to someone who didn't frivolously self-diagnose themself). You were generally closer to a straw man, because you didn't just point out that some pro-Palestinians make the fallacious arguments in question, you clearly suggested I myself was making some of these terrible arguments.
But to the extent that you did qualify your statements, e.g. once when challenged you said:
> In some cases, those are the arguments my opponents are actually making. Perhaps you're more sophisticated than the modal anti-Zionist, but that doesn't make you typical. There are a lot of historically illiterate supporters of the Palestinian cause out there.
That is EXACTLY what Scott is talking about. Obviously it is! You're focusing attention on the worst of my allies, while completely ignoring the reality of what I'm actually arguing. As Scott puts it (in literally the final sentence, in case anyone was confused about the point):
> She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self-diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along.
You're either deliberately pretending not to see that you've done exactly that, and accusing me of misinterpreting the post to deflect, or... well, or the pro-Israel lobby aren't sending their best.
And by the way, uncharitable interpreting every one of my arguments doesn't make it "moving the goalposts" when I clarify.
I wrote way more than I intended to when I started replying; your brand of dishonest, obfuscatory mud-slinging just irritates me, I can't help myself. So frankly I'm not even going to read the next one. You've wasted enough of my time, and any fair-minded reader of this exchange will be under no illusions at this stage. There's nothing more to be gained from this. Enjoy feeling superior to all those emotive idiots who prefer the risk of another 1,000 dying in the coming decades to killing 60,000 preventively now.
Wow. Somebody has been drinking in Nazi propaganda. Either that or you are a Russian troll.
I don't think this is a productive contribution to the discussion.
It is, in fact, perfectly acceptable to kill tens of thousands of enemy combatants in retaliation for their killing a thousand of your people, or as many more as it takes to get them to surrender should you be capable of such. To not do so is a suicidal morality. War isn't supposed to be sportsmanlike. You just kill the enemy until you win or lose, but do whatever you can to win. We certainly killed a lot more civilians in Germany and Japan than they ever did into the US. Same with just every other war we've ever been in. Most civilian deaths in the Civil War were on the Confederate side, too. That's what you have to do when your enemy is also determined to win. You have to show you want it more.
> in fact, perfectly acceptable to kill tens of thousands of enemy combatants
If your view was at all defensible, you wouldn't need to do this kind of sleight of hand. You know we weren't talking about enemy combatants. I said 'tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians'. You know those children aren't enemy combatants.
You must know this stuff isn't going to persuade anyone. So why are you doing it? Just to be edgy?
> That's what you have to do when your enemy is also determined to win. You have to show you want it more.
Well that answers that.
I'm not sure if you have read the thread, but most of us are trying to have a serious conversation here. If your moral worldview is 'you have to kill thousands of infants to show you want it more', I'm afraid you can't be part of it.
How many millions of innocent Germans died in WW12? How many Japanese? How many German women were raped and murdered by Russian soldiers?
The problem with Israel is that they have taken too much trouble to protect civilians. That is why they never win. They should have fought the way every other country does. Then there would not have been any of the terrorism problems.
It is a safe assumption to assume that everyone criticizing Israel is either anti-Semitic or a Chinese or Russian troll. You clearly fall into that characterization.
Of course, in Hollywood the evil enemy will just slip and fall off the cliff, sparing the hero from having to kill him. Similarly, we should expect the Hamas guys accidentally fall out of their windows, one by one.
None of the celebrity statements in the article you linked to support your claim that Hollywood celebrities called for a ceasefire in Oct and Nov 2023 because they think it's morally impermissible to retaliate against a previous aggressor who is not currently aggressing. All but one of the quotes* allege disproportionate killing and wounding of innocent Palestinians—which presumably refers to Palestinians who were not involved in violent attacks on Israelis. You don't address proportionality in Hollywood morality at all in this post.
Ironically, if we use the Star Wars series as a proxy, Hollywood morality tells us that massive loss of civilian life is fine if it is collateral damage. Here's a discussion about how many civilians the good guys kill in the Star Wars movies, particularly by blowing up the Death Stars:
https://screenrant.com/star-wars-death-star-destroyed-deaths/
So, George Lucas was not consistent, and if anything, Star Wars could be used as a justification for killing a huge number of innocent civilians to neutralize a few bad people—the very opposite of what the Hollywood ceasefire advocates were saying.
*The one exception is Kehlani, whose quote in the article implies that Oct. 7 was an act of resistance against occupation and apartheid—but this also has nothing to do with your theorizing about Hollywood morality in this post.
> So, George Lucas was not consistent, and if anything, Star Wars could be used as a justification for killing a huge number of innocent civilians to neutralize a few bad people—the very opposite of what the Hollywood ceasefire advocates were saying.
Good point! Would the author feel it was fair for someone to write a substack post asking, therefore, "to what extent the American right has exported lessons from TV and movies to the real world" and calling his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict "deeply misguided" based on his imaginary embrace of this made-up principle that he didn't remotely espouse? If not, why does he think it's fair to do that to his opponents with regard to the idea that they think retaliation or preventive violence is never permissible?
Thanks for this. A lot of the examples here are clearly strange as you point out, particularly if you assume they’re meant for adult consumption. But the superhero who strangely never kills the super villain might better be explained by market forces surrounding the original audience’s demographic—children—than by the emotional satisfaction of the narrative.
If Super Man crushes Lex Luthor’s skull, while this might be morally justified and benefit humanity, it will hurt Super Man’s marketability to children. Mom won’t buy a comic book for little Jimmy where Jimmy’s idol executes people. And this is in part because little Jimmy can’t easily distinguish between Lex Luthor and the prick kid in gym class who gives him wet-willies. Jimmy might be more inclined to disproportionately respond with excessive violence.
Super villain survival also allows creators to build a serial narrative with familiar characters, and saves time/effort associated with the conceptual development of entirely new villains.
Star Wars is similar. Its enormous success was in part due to its ability to entertain children and adults simultaneously. Notice how Star Wars villains are typically alien, robotic or made to resemble machines (e.g. storm troopers). They’re dehumanized and their deaths are often bloodless and largely implied.
It’s only relatively recently that superhero content started being consumed at scale by adults (up through the 80s and early 90s it was still kid’s stuff). Now that this audience has been tapped, you see more narratives like Deadpool, where murder and execution are very common.
As others have touched on, I think this is as much religious (not just Christian) as it is Hollywood. You act in the 'right' way, and the moral laws of the universe (God) will bail you out.
This seems to be a common lesson of various morality tales and is maybe necessary to spread belief in simple, universal rules that are net positive over having each individual carefully weigh each case before them (with lots of resources expended fact finding and arguing). To properly perform this role, stories need to embody the most extreme examples of deontological absolutism.
I think this probably also explains why there is so much dissonance sometimes with modern 'woke' storytelling (e.g. the villain is excused solely on account of having suffered / victim group membership). The logic of storytelling (at least as fables that instruct in proper values + behaviour) demands examples that are pushed to the extremes. However values have changed, and small changes are made to appear very obvious. In fact you could argue (I probably wouldn't) that recent craziness is overstated, and if we travelled backwards through time people would be shocked by the sudden change to overt 'unwoke' messaging in the early part of the 21st century.
> (e.g. the villain is excused solely on account of having suffered / victim group membership)
What are some examples of the latter? I don't think I've ever seen that in any fictional medium.
I'd say Wicked counts, but Wicked goes as far as to completely rewrite the history of Oz into something quite different that doesn't make any sense at all. Particularly given the race blind casting of the film adaptation, which totally undermines the concept of persecuting someone for having green skin.
With so many males raised by single mothers and female school teachers, young men are left to what's on screens to learn how to be men. Hollywood is as feminine as home and school. That's why I wrote Ideal Man REVIVING MASCULINITY. Boys need guidance into manhood.
I have seen this so much. Young men end up taking on an imagined tough guy persona that only makes sense in the mind of a child. I think the repeated description of poor minority men as "victims" is especially destructive. No young man wants that description hanging on him. Unsurprisingly many of these young men put on a violent, hyper-masculine act that often ends up forcing them into impossible situations that land them in jail or the morgue. So many of these "activist" types are creating the worst possible environment for these young men. I suspect that they know it, and they do it anyway because its gets their organizations better funding. There is no industry as cut-throat and competitive as the NGO/non-profit sector. They do far more harm than good.
Herman Wouk wrote a blockbuster, The Winds of War, about a naïvely optimistic German Jew who refused to escape the Nazis while he had the chance. I think that part of the mystique of the Second Striker is the action movie/Western hero who brushes off provocation, because he is so strong that he has no need to be afraid; thus extreme tolerance of threats is a sign of courage and strength. Every now and then the scriptwriters like to mix it up a little by letting the hero take a beating. Hubris much?
I think there’s validity in discouraging vigilanteism, ie super hero’s not taking the law into their own hands but allowing for due process but you’re mostly right, Hollywood morality sanitizes way too much, dividing the world into good and bad or, a favourite trope, always giving the bad guy another chance (probably coming from Christianity) whilst forgetting about the victims
Killing someone in self defense isn't vigilantism. It's not like Han went out to hunt Greedo and kill him while his back was turned, which'd at least kinda be morally gray. Greedo was clearly going to kill Han from the beginning, given he greeted him by pointing a gun to his head, and was just toying with him out of sadism. His wickedness saved Han's life.
This falls into the trap of thinking that extreme situations are the way we should construct morality.
In fact, we should construct our moral sense first on the most banal and everyday events.
For example, it is absolutely correct to find out why some has done something to upset you instead of immediately or even pre-emptively strike back. Seeking peace in personal relations makes for a better world for everyone.
The corollary is true as well, you can’t take personal morality and ethics and apply it cataclysmic and existential stories like the ones told by Hollywood. You’re right, it’s silly and doesn’t make sense.
In the end, you can’t really build a worldview on thought experiments, you have to build it by talking to people, learning about different ways of understanding our place here. It’s bad enough that we are all blind monks trying to describe an elephant, when you have monks trying to imagine an elephant without touching it, that’s when things get weird.
I strongly disagree. Thought experiments are so valuable precisely because thinking about everyday situations warps our intuitions. The human brain is not optimised for modelling the situations it encounters accurately; it's optimised for modelling them usefully in a practical sense.
Therefore we must take it out of this mode, and consider examples which test the shape and limits of principles in the abstract.
Absolutely agree that it’s good to understand how the brain works and that thought experiments help us do that.
Can you give an example of real world example of an ethical decision that would be directly informed by the trolley problem?
Covid lockdowns.
Spell it out for me. Who was on the tracks, who was at the switch?
On one set of the tracks were the old, infirm and immuno-compromised people who were the presumed beneficiaries of lockdowns.
On the other set of the tracks was the remaining population of young and healthy people.
The government was at the switch.
The basic assumption of lockdowns was that, by throwing the switch, you are imposing some amount of distributed suffering on the second track (in the form of unemployment, inflation, social isolation, cancelled cancer screenings, domestic violence etc.) but thereby saving the people on the first track from dying of Covid.
Of course, the longer the pandemic went on, this simple framing grew increasingly dubious. You might throw the switch and it diverts the train onto the other track, but then the train somehow hits both tracks (lockdowns are only estimated to have prevented about 0.2% of Covid deaths) or another train comes down the tracks shortly afterwards (even if Covid didn't get them, the people who were most at risk of dying from Covid would go on to be killed by something else within a year or two of the pandemic's end).
There were many different tracks in the Pandemic and not all of them had people tied to them. Reducing the choice to a binary ignores all the other choices that could have been made. Thinking of the pandemic in these terms reduces everyone to either a friend or an enemy when this is clearly not the case. The true enemy is the person who would make you think this way. A friend will always open up your choices and give you options beyond your experience.
Using high level abstractions to understand the world removes you from the world and separates you from people.
The decision to bomb Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Gaza, etc. are some of the clearest real-world examples of such ethical dilemmas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
As you can see from this very long Wikipedia page, the ethics of extreme death are highly complex and debated. I hardly see how knowing the trolley problem could have swayed people’s decisions here.
On one hand you could have a group that says ‘kill one save six’ and another group that says ‘kill six instead of one to demonstrate power’.
The experiment was not created to expedite military decision making making, rather is was created to examine “the meta-problem of why different judgements are arrived at in particular instances.”
Remember that you disagreed with the idea that a worldview can’t be properly formed from the extreme, abstracted, scenarios of action adventure movies. Ethics, worldviews, moral centres need to come from a variety of sources, including conversations, books of wisdom, observations of animals, family stories. Sure extreme situations can be a part, I would argue a small part, but if it’s the main part, you end up being able to justify war crimes like Hiroshima and Gaza.
I don't understand your objection. Surely it's clear how our response to the trolley problem could inform a decision with regard to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, given how straightforwardly analogous it is to those situations?
How is it relevant that the ethics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are complicated? Did you interpret me as suggesting that the trolley problem can only inform the solution to simple problems?
I'll bring you back to the original point. My critique is that Hollywood abstractions can't alone make a world view. That people make an error when they think there is a macrocosm in extreme events depicted on screen that can inform the microcosm of their lives.
Much happier to discuss that, but I will try address your questions.
I would say that no, your response to the trolley problem would not inform how you make choices around killing people. The reason why it's not informative is in the problem itself and why the problem is interesting.
You will remember that the original thought experiment was presented to investigate why people might make different choices in similar circumstances. It was presented as two options: in the first scenario your choice was to pull a switch to alter the outcome, the second option was to push a man and kill him to alter the outcome. Most people would do the first thing, but not the second. The outcome of this experiment showed both that people are less likely to do direct murders, but are better with indirect murders and also that small changes in a system can drastically affect the out come if there are humans involved.
As well, you don't have a body in the experiment, you have no idea what particular chemical concoction you would have in your brain at the time. Are you a fight, flight, freeze or fawn responder?
The relevance of the complexity of the problem shows how ineffective applying simplified abstractions to it. We are tactical creatures, and are often surprised by our responses to complex situations. We draw on a huge wealth of knowledge, loyalties, desires when we approach decision making in the real world. Although philosophical exercises might help frame your approach, I guarantee you will be weighing the happiness of your friends and family much higher than a previous response to an abstract question. If the abstract question is a primary consideration, you might have issues that can't be resolved in a comment section.
I didn't suggest that you thought it was the only solution, I suggested that it's consideration would be so low as to be non existent.
Quick explainer of the problem https://youtu.be/bOpf6KcWYyw
"Exception: the government is allowed to punish people by putting them in jail. But if you’re not the government, you can’t do it."
Yes, Hollywood Morality has an absolute deference to established authority, unless that authority has somehow clearly been corrupted beforehand.
Obvious how that has influenced society.
This may be the one of the few surviving clauses of the Hays Code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code
Hollywood's idolatry of authority even extended so far to forbidding Warner Bros. from making anti-Nazi films in the second half of the 1930s.
Movies are so bad these days. I often recommend films to young men I know. It is odd. I am used to movies always getting better, but that has stopped for American movies. For literature it is even worse. I feel like games and fantasy/sci-fi are the only interesting areas left.
Let me add one more absurdity: Hollywood reinforces a concept of "honor among thieves", or a type of inner-group moral precedence. You see this whenever a villain betrays another villain within his social circle. That guy then becomes The True Villain and the "friends" that he wronged work with the heros to take him down.
It's not that this concept is original to Hollywood; it is genuinely grounded in common moral psychology and in how we do character judgments. Yet it obviously has no justification - murder is murder, regardless of who is murdered. Pushing a sense of forgiveness toward those who are parochially good doesn't really track with actual real-world evils: genocide, for instance, isn't usually the work of a lone psychopath, but rather many otherwise normal folk who have shrunken moral circles.
Not to mention in real life, those who work in criminal organizations betray and kill their comrades all the time, both out of greed and personal safety. People who don't want to do this tend to avoid joining, or staying in, criminal organizations.
But sending “Hugh” back to the collective worked as a mind virus, shown when he reappears in “Datalore”.
Lmao this is completely moronic